Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 6 Jul 2008 16:07:14 -0400 | From | "Timothy Normand Miller" <> | Subject | HELP: Getting unexpected fakeraid behavior. Fix? |
| |
I apologize if this is a question that has come up a lot. I've done a fair amount of googling on it, and while I've learned a lot, I have not been able to find an answer to my specific question.
I'm running a beta of Gentoo 2008.0, ~amd64, kernel version 2.6.25-gentoo-r5 (Gentoo's 'genkernel'). The drive controller I'm using is built into the Intel ICH9R southbridge. I used the Intel Matrix BIOS tool to configure two SATA-II drives in a RAID1 configuration.
My understanding of fakeraid/dmraid is as follows: - There is no real RAID controller, just a regular drive controller chip. - The only difference is that there's some BIOS code that allows the system BIOS use the array as a boot device. - Once the kernel comes up, it's completely in control of the individual drives, I/O scheduling, etc. (They look like regular SATA devices.) - So since fakeraid, as far as Linux is concerned, is just software RAID, behavior and performance of fakeraid (dm) and software RAID (md) should be identical (via the same drive controller).
Since RAID1 is a mirrored configuration, it's possible to distribute reads across the drives, improving throughput and latency over a single drive on random reads. I have also come to understand that RAID1 systems in general and Linux specifically do in fact take advantage of this mirroring to improve read performance.
I have written a program that, on start up, reads through thousands of small files, and as a result does a great deal of random reads for several minutes. While that was going on, I ran "iostat -d 2". My observation was that any writes that occurred were correctly sent to both disks, but all reads were being requested ONLY from the first drive.
This suggests to me that I have some configuration mistake. Can anyone give me any hints on this?
Thanks!
-- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project
| |